11 Hot Takes to Make Better Ads in 2024

Jess Bachman: Very honored to be here. Very excited to be teaching with you guys, learning with you guys. Um, I do have a presentation. I've been collecting some of my hottest takes over the past several months, stuff that people haven't heard. And I wanted to, um, run through that with you with you guys. So let me, uh, can we share my screen?

All right, here we go. Are you guys ready? I actually have never presented this before. I actually don't know how long it's going to take. I'm probably going to go extra fast so we leave some time for questions.

Um, but I'm Jess Bachman, Creative Strategy Director at FireTeam. We are a performance-focused creative strategy and production agency working with seven to nine figure brands. This is, uh, my team. Apparently, we're, we're from hell, um, as well.

We have this weird Icelandic domain. Uh, don't ask me why. I don't know. And then I'm on Twitter or all the other social medias at Hire Fire Team, and you can find me on LinkedIn as well.

So my goal here, my true goal is to deliver as much value as fast as I can jam in here. Um, if you feel that any of these particular takes are delivering value, I'd love to see like a fire emoji in the chat or something. If you feel that these are not delivering value, feel free to shout at me on Twitter so I know who to block. All right. So, here we go. Let's get started.

With the first one, how to spot bad creative advice. Now, we're all looking to learn from each other and stuff, but there is a few guardrails before you just suck in someone else's hot take.

Um, and I have a few red flags. Uh, this is doesn't apply to anyone in particular, but my few red flags are,

single brand operators. So these are people who, um, made it big from one particular brand, or they only work at one particular brand. And they can be amazingly smart people, but they've also built their business in a particular way that suits their particular business, and their marketing strategy revolves around that. So, just be careful to see that might not apply to what you're doing.

If they speak in absolutes, something will always work. This is the solution.

Um, only the Sith, uh, speak in absolutes. So be careful they might be a Sith Lord or something like that.

Uh, and then lastly, they are clearly selling you something. So, everyone on the internet is basically selling you something. Every expert is selling you something. Um, that doesn't mean that you discount what they say automatically, but just try to be cognizant of what they are selling because that may affect how they are speaking or the content that they are delivering. What am I selling you to right now? Like, so be skeptical of of what I'm saying to say as well. And if they are clearly selling you something, um, then be hyper skeptical as well.

All right. The the eternal debate of agency versus in-house.

I do work at an agency, so which is better, agency or in-house?

The answer is, it's in-house. There is you will find no one that cares more about your business than the people that rely on those paychecks to to keep it going. And so you you won't find a more hardworking, dedicated people than your own particular staff.

However, there's a huge asterisk involved here. That asterisk is, um, if you can attract and retain exceptional talent and have a plan to combat the creative compartmentalization that always plagues in-house teams. That is a huge caveat, but it is something that sort of always happens. If you if you can get around that, if you can fix that, your in-house team is going to be amazing.

Um, but if not, like this is the whole reason why agencies exist to combat this particular, um, thing.

So, I like to think as agencies and his house as like the, um, the epic handshake, both working together in in conflict. And so, I mean, because you need you need both sides of this coin.

So on the agency side, you do want fresh and multi-perspectives. Agency have seen a lot of different accounts and they can apply what's working to other accounts. Um, it's also, you know, good talent on demand for the most part. On the on in-house side, you have a deeper focus. No one knows your business more than people that do it 40 hours a week and all the various particulars that that are involved there. And also it can certainly be cheaper at scale once you have, uh, once you're sort of staffed up as well. So what you really want here is competition between your agency and your in-house team where the agency and in-house team are trying to create better ads than each other and they're learning from each other. And that is the most, that's like the best outcome, uh, that we've generally see in accounts.

Um, we like to see about like 50% of your ad spend going to like agency or or contractors or whatever and the other 50% being in-house. That is a a pretty solid mix there.

Um, if you go, if you're like 80% agency-based creative, then maybe you need to beef up your in-house team a little bit or there's something going on or maybe your agency has too much power or something. And then if it's 80% in-house creative, then maybe it's your agency's not making the best stuff and you should find another one or something. But you there is no, I've never seen it, I've never seen it truly success with one or the other. It's always a collaboration and a competition, um, between these.

So, when do you get an agency?

Well, to answer that, first, we need to talk about how much to spend on creative production because these are huge decisions that brands need to make, uh, all the time.

And so, basically, if I like to look at it as like percentage of ad spend, and anywhere between 5% to 15% of your ad spend on creative production. So let's say you you spend $100,000 a month, that's anywhere between $5,000 to $15,000 is is a solid place to be. I feel like the sweet spot is right around 10%. Um, however, if it's, you try to make it work with less than 5%, you're kind of shooting yourself in your foot and you probably don't have you can't create the right creative to scale the account. And if you're more than 15%, there's probably some certainly some efficiencies that can be made to to get that down as well. So, if we put this in sort of a column, like with monthly ad spend and the solution here. So if you're $1,000 a month, that's about 10% you would spend on creative, so $100. This is where you are picking up the phone yourself and shooting it or working with your family or whatever. That's the DIY solution. $10,000, you have $1,000 to spend. This is where you start to work with contractors. There's lots of good ones for various different price points. 50,000, you're now spending 5,000 on creative. This is where you can get, uh, a cheap agency. There's plenty of those as well. $100,000, this is where you're spending $10,000 a month on creative production. This is where you can afford to hire a good agency. And then, you know, keep going up where you're spending 500,000, so 50,000. So this is where you have a good agency and you are start to building out that in-house team. You're hiring a creative strategist, uh, you're putting your your graphic designer on stuff. Uh, maybe you have a video editor or something like that. That's going to be important. When you're starting over a million and you have a lot to spend, this is where you're really developing your in-house team and it's supplemented by good agencies. Um, and it doesn't scale infinitely or whatever. There's lots of efficiencies once you're rolling in-house, but this is generally, uh, the range that I like to see.

All right. So, accounts should be mostly video. Um, I'm not sure if this is a hot take, but I definitely see people who are like, static is crushing right now.

And so, we need to think of static as what it is. Static images simply has less persuasive power than video. Video is the real deal. You are, you have voiceover, you have people, you have dialogue, you have music, you have motion, you can see people's expressions, you can explain stuff. Video will do the most of the persuasion. Static does work. I'm not saying static does not work, but it only works on the people that don't need a lot of persuasion.

So if we think of the different stages of awareness, from unaware down to the most aware, the static video will work on people who are lower in those stages of awareness. If you go into your ad accounts right now and you filter by static versus video and you look at the frequency of static images, you will find that it's higher than the video. Now, why is it higher? Because there's a smaller pool of people that static images work. People that already know your brand, maybe they're already been hitting with remarketing or whatever.

So that is where static does work and that's where the static should be focused around. This is why it's very rational, like features or benefits or or those types of things. But video, you need video to fill the funnel. You need video to convince people who don't care, who don't have time, who aren't already seeking a solution to persuade them. And video will do that. So, video to fill the funnel, static to empty it. It's never one or the other. In fact, when we see accounts that are static heavy, that is a sign of, uh, either an unhealthy account or a very large brand that has all kinds of a bunch of unaided awareness because they're they're just huge and so they need that static to fill the or flush out the very large funnel.

So, the most important creative metric. Everyone feels like they have one that they love. I would love to know in the chat what you feel the most important creative metric is.

Is it hold rate? Like what do you look at first? Like what to you is is matters most? ROAS. Okay, there we go. Spend. I love spend. CCT because you told us in your tweet. Yes. Okay. So, you are right.

The answer is CCT. Now, I guarantee you, no one has heard of this because I literally made it up recently.

However, I do believe that this is fundamentally the account, the the metric that you should orient your entire business about. Creative cycle time. The creative cycle time. I'll I'll explain what that is in a little bit more depth, but we've worked with a lot of different brands and the brands that are growing the fastest are able to adapt to to the trends, are the ones with the lowest creative cycle time. And the other ones who are who are struggling and growing slowly or like, maybe it's not ads, maybe it's landing pages or just, you know, spinning tops, have the highest creative cycle time.

So, let's get into this. Creative cycle time. What is it? Basically, all ads are guesses. Any ad you put out there is a guess. You don't know if it works. But the iterations on those are educated guesses. They should have a higher chance of working. And so, basically, what we want to have here is this is the cycle. You put an ad and you and you test it. You put you put money behind it, you get data, you see if it works or not. Um, and then you analyze that data. And you, you know, you look in Motion, you look in reports, you you figure out what's working or what's not. And then based off that, you then make another ad. So that requires, you know, production, maybe it's edits or maybe it's a different idea or something. And then once you make that other ad, you put that back into market and and it repeats again.

So, there's what you really need to do here is learn how to first, it'd be interesting to go into your own organizations and see how long it takes you to put an ad and then to get an iteration of that ad back into market. See how long that might take you. Um, and then you want to look at every stage and be like, how can I squeeze the time to do these different stages? So, um, for testing an ad, ad spend is a function of time. You could you could spend $5 a day on an ad and test it in in a year, or you could spend $500 a day and test it, uh, in a in a couple of days. That doesn't mean that's the right strategy, but, um, ad spend will compress time. Testing structure, you do need a good testing structure. I'll talk about that a little bit later. Um, and then, so what you need to be careful of is that if you're not spending on an ad, you are not getting a result. If there's no results, there's no action to be taken there. There's nothing you can do. A a non-result is is worse than discovering a loser. Like, I want to find a loser so that I can then possibly fix it or figure out why it's a loser and turn that into a learning. A non-result, uh, will slow you down significantly. No action means no change. You can't do anything with it and you're just kind of stuck. So I often see when we do audits, accounts that just are not spending enough to get any type of result or change or just cycle at all. Um, so the the analyst part is is all three parts of these are hugely important. So you do need competent tools to to that aid in the speed of analytics and also the dissemination of of information. Um, Motion, by bar none, is like, hands down the best. I don't even know if there's other tools, but it's Motion is the one you need to get. The second part of this is great, particularly fast communication. So, this so I'm talking about between the media buyer and the creatives on your team. Like the media buyer is looking at this stuff and they need to be like, okay, this is working, this is not working, give that data or the reports or whatever to the creatives so then they can, um, do what they have to do. Or if you're working with an agency and the brand's doing the media buying, you need to give that information to the agency and the agency needs to give back the information of what they're going to do. So communication is key and figure out different ways to optimize for quicker, faster communication. Again, Motion is one of those tools where you're like, your your agency can be in Motion or your creative strategist can be in Motion and your media buyer. So it is one of those tools where you can almost eliminate this step if you have both competent people on your team. And so eliminating, uh, a huge part of this step is key. So if you're talking the same language, using the same tools, um, that would be ideal. And then lastly, be careful that your reporting frequency can be a speed limit. So if you are like, we report on our ads every month, and then once you figure out what are the learnings, then you then you, you know, create iterations from that. Well, now you've you've hard-coded into your process a one-month cycle time at the very least. You don't have to do that. You can report, uh, weekly or you can do no reporting and have your your creative strategist in motion or something figuring out. So be very careful of hard-coding parts of your cycle time. And then you need to make an ad. This is also also challenging. You need a talented creative team, uh, that that knows what it's doing as well. You need good creator relationships. If you work with creators a lot, you need to pay their rates. If because if you go back to them and be like, hey, I need to do this quick edit, you don't want them to be like, all right, you're now like ninth in the queue because you haggled with me over $200 or something. So, good creative relationships is is the grease to to this particular flywheel. Also, if you do work with an agency, I highly suggest very flexible scope of works where again, you are not hard-coding, um, you know, lengthy deliveries or monthly deliveries or something like that into this particular cycle time. And then be aware of is the slow approvals or feedback. If you're from a brand or if you're a creative strategist, as you're reviewing it, brand owners or whatever, if you're reviewing it, if you're looking at other people's ads to figure out what might work or what what doesn't work, everyone is evaluating ads. And, um, like we have a whole show called Ad Autopsy where we do this live. And the number one skill, like you can read all the, you know, pop psychologist marketing books or whatever and try to hold all that in your head, but nothing is going to compare to developing this one skill, which is noticing how you feel when watching an ad. So, you ask yourself two questions. What am I feeling while watching this ad on a second by second basis? Like you need to turn up the sensitivity on your brain and the emotions that are flooding through it and ask yourself, what am I feeling? Am I bored? Am I engaged? Am I confused, which is a probably the number one problem of ads. Um, or do I feel like, I don't know, something is off. Like you're watching an ad and you just, you just identify, okay, I feel I'm feeling something, what is that something? And come up with that particular answer. Once you have that, you ask the second question, and this second question will help you deliver feedback, make edits or whatever, which is why am I feeling it? So, it's like, am I bored? Okay, so maybe there's like, there's a cut that's like too long or something and we just need some more cuts in here to improve that. Uh, am I engaged? Maybe because there's a great creator and a great read and I just feel myself engaged in what this person is talking about. Let's use that creator again on five more projects. Am I confused? Now, you do need to look at your ads as someone who doesn't know everything about the brand or hasn't read the brief or whatever, which is, uh, challenging in and of itself. But like, just feel a little bit of confusion, you're like, maybe I was a little confused at this part, so I'm going to add a banner to give it a little bit of extra context or something like that. Do I feel off? Identify what that is. Maybe like the music vibe didn't fit or something and so make that change. So these two questions will, I would stack up these two questions. If you're good at this skill versus like, you know, 100 pounds of marketing psychology books, uh, in your brain.

So, how to create test creative like a a baseball umpire, the right way. So this one is, um, I don't know why this is like the spiciest take or why, uh, there's camps around this, but, uh, I'll give you my version, uh, of this.

Okay. So, just a warning, we have an overly overly elaborate metaphor warning going on here. I love metaphors. I do think they help explain things. Um, if you are not familiar with baseball, uh, I deeply apologize to what's about to happen.

But here we go. This is a metaphor. We have a batter, catcher, and an umpire.

You are the umpire. Your job is to judge balls, strikes, whatever. The ad, a new ad that you're testing is, uh, the batter here.

And then each swing is the CPA worth of ad spend. So if your CPA is like $100, each $100 of ad spend, we can say is a swing. The catcher is not in this metaphor, so don't worry about it.

So, let's look at this, um, in a different perspective. So, if the CPA is $100 and the ad spend, we have purchases, you spend $100, zero purchases, well, that's a strike. Strike, strike one. There we go. $200 of spend, no purchases, strike two. There we go. You know how this works, baseball. $300 worth of purchase, $300 of ad spend, zero purchases, strike three, you're out of there. Um, you can, you can cut that ad. Um, it's done. However, however, it's not that simple. And this is where the skill, your skill of an umpire comes into play. So, for example, if we go back to here, and we, you know, spend another $100, we do have a purchase. That's not a strike. That's a foul. Something's working here. You made contact. This is not a a hit or whatever, but we can continue to spend because we haven't struck out. We spend another one, we got another purchase. That's another foul. Here we go. And then so we spend another $100, we got a zero purchases. There's a third strike. And again, you can cut that ad for sure. That's generally, so this is, so when people say like, you know, three to five times the CPA of of the what you should be spending on testing a particular ad, this is kind of like the guts of how that should work. And now it does get a little more complicated, um, as well. So let's say we have three strikes, $300 in purchases, or $300 in ad spend, no purchases. Are you going to cut that ad?

Well, problem is, it's got no purchases, but the thumb stop is actually excellent. So there's something working here, or maybe the hold rate is like is really good. So there's something kind of working here. So we're going to say that last strike is a foul and we're just going to give it a little bit of extra bit of lead. And if we, you know, we keep going down and if if it feels like the ad is working, then you can give it a little bit of rope. However, you can't just foul off forever. At some point, you know, you're going to strike out, someone's going to catch a foul or whatever. And so you do need to make that particular call. And that is your job, uh, as as a media buyer looking at this stuff or a creative strategist who is evaluating the performance of these ads. This is your job. And now, so, the other thing is we rare, so we rarely find ads get to, using this particular method, we rarely find that ads get to 10 times the CPA, um, and that they are still a loser. They may be lower, they may have a lower ROAS across like the entire spend, but they should be seeing them get better over like the last week or the last few days or the last quarter of spend.

So when does an ad become a hit?

CPA is $100. We'll say a hit, a single is 10 times the CPA. That's $1,000. That is a, that is not a home run. That is not a quote unquote winner. That is just a single. It it did its job. It got $1,000 worth of spend and it wasn't, you know, unprofitable or it wasn't terrible. 100 times the CPA, we'll call that a double. That's $10,000. 1,000 times the CPA, we'll call it a triple. That's $100,000 in spend on an ad unit. 1,000 times the CPA, that is what we're calling the, uh, bases clearing home run, a million dollars. Very hard to do. Only works with like very large brands. However, the thing about this is like, people share like the super mega winners or a lot of times when we're auditing accounts, there'll just be one ad that's just hoovering up all the spend. Maybe it's a triple, maybe it's a home run or something. And those are great to have in the account, but it's the singles and doubles that are going to generate the runs. The singles and doubles are, they go after like, the home run will go after, it's one ad, so it's going to appeal to one type of person. It may be a pretty broad person and it's pretty effective, but it's going to appeal to one type of person. And this is why you need to explore the concept because there'll be other ads that have similar but that appeal to a slightly different person or resonate a little bit in a different way. And those can be singles and doubles. And if you start adding those up, then you're all of a sudden you're at $2 million of spend versus just a million.

So, singles and doubles win ball games. I know Andrew Ferris would disagree with me based on a purely Bayesian point of view, and he'd probably be right. But in terms of the ad account point of view, uh, he's definitely wrong.

All right. The amount you spend testing creative should be proportionate to your confidence in the creative.

So, uh, there's lots of tactics where you just like flood the account with 100 random UGC things from seeding, whatever. Or you have an ad with it's like 20 hooks on it and you have no idea what works. These are viable strategies. What you should not do is use the previous media buying testing strategy on this stuff.

If you have random UGC, you don't know if it works, no idea, then yeah, give it 50 cents. Put it in a freaking giant AAC or whatever and just see where Meta likes to land on it. You're basically, your batters are basically like little league here and you're just like tossing on a ball and see who gets hit with the ball and gets the first, you know, whatever. That's that's fine, perfectly fine strategy.

But if you're working with good in-house or agency creative,

or iterations. Like iterations are versions of stuff that like either does work or kind of works.

So you have high confidence that they're going to spend well. So, we want the three times the CPA at minimum. This is the three strikes, the three strikes rule at minimum.

This is basically, if you're running with these types of ads, this is basically your dugout of highly paid professional ball players. There's nothing that breaks my heart more than making an amazing ad and seeing it sit in some cost cap creative testing account with $4 of spend for weeks. Um, it's it truly brings tears to my eyes.

So, with that, the creative testing structure actually doesn't matter. Only spend and time matter. So if you want to do an ABO with dedicated spend, that's fine. If you want to do an ASC of of only, uh, new stuff, that's great. If you want to do a CBO with like a little bit of minimum spend in there, um, that's fine. All these things are totally fine as long as ads are getting spend in a reasonable amount of time. If you have like an ASC with with the mega winner in it, like the home run from two years ago, and it's sucking up all the spend, that is not testing, uh, at all. And that's that's lengthening the cycle time of the whole organization.

And then lastly, and this probably isn't a hot take, um, because it because it shouldn't be,

is that Evan Lee is the best session MC in the entire biz. Um, and I want to thank, uh, all y'all guys for having me on.

Uncontroversial.

Evan Lee: Jess, this is the definition of fire. There's so many amazing, uh, well, just like takes in general. Your dog came. You should see how many questions have come in of just like, I want to see your dog, Jess. Can we see your dog, Jess? Please, please, please.

Jess Bachman: Well, I'm at a standing desk and he's like 120 pounds, so I I need some gains in order for that to happen.

Evan Lee: I feel like you definitely delivered. The chat's going been crazy the entire time, so I feel like you definitely delivered, man. I don't know how much you've been able to keep up as you were going through it, but amazing, amazing.

Jess Bachman: Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Everyone in the chat, I love that.

Evan Lee: Okay. So, folks, we have 12 minutes left here for Q&A.

Uh, so please just visit there, throw in your questions. Also, keep upvoting. Alexandria has taken over and everyone wants to know what's going on there. So I feel like we need to do it justice and Alexandria, the first question is of course going to be yours. But Jess, how often should creatives be refreshed or rotated to avoid ad fatigue?

Jess Bachman: Uh, so that's an interesting question because you wouldn't, you don't make, you don't make an edit to something that already is working. And so once you determine that it that it is working, you you let it ride until it fatigues. What you want to do of is get ahead of the fatigue. Um, so I would like, like if you can get new creative on a weekly or bi-weekly basis at, um, at a minimum, that that's where I'd want to be. Even on even on smaller accounts. So it's not a monthly thing.

Evan Lee: Yeah. Yeah, it's such a helpful framework. Honestly, it's like you can be overprotective almost and it's just like, how can we let the data to tell us like when stuff like this needs to be addressed?

So, the one, the one caveat that we see is you can get more creative into an account than you can effectively test, particularly at a lower spend rate. So if you're like, oh, I just got a freaking 50 batch of creatives and you're only spending like 20k a month, it's going to take forever to to do that, to test that properly as well.

Evan Lee: Amazing. And Jess, earlier on you talked a lot about formats and like the opinion on static versus, uh, like videos and how videos help with the education at ton. So Jeremy's popping in with a question. So Jeremy from New Zealand, first of all, welcome to the party. I know it's either super late or super early, so thank you. But Jeremy asks, how do you optimize your workflow for format? EG, do you produce landscape, portrait, and square versions of everything? Am I being lazy when I just do portrait with a lot of free space? How do you approach this?

Jess Bachman: No, it it kind of depends on the size of your brand because, uh, iterating on formats can, you're adding a whole different export, which can add time, uh, and cost and may have marginal gain depending on how much spend you have. Um, so generally for our larger brands, um, you know, we we deliver 9 by 16s, we do squares, we do 4 by 5s that are very particular. Um, but if if you're spending like under, I'd probably say 75k a month, I really would not stress exporting a whole bunch of different formats and trying to squeeze out juice from that.

Evan Lee: And I think people always talk about too about iterating yourself and the algorithm into a corner. So I'm curious if you have thoughts on that. Like are you a believer? Is it, uh, where's your head at?

Jess Bachman: Yeah, so we'll we'll usually, it really depends on what you're looking at in Motion. If you can, we we start with the hook rate and and we can make some changes to that. And if it works, great. But if we don't, we don't rehab an ad. Like, you you know, you need to know when to like, you need to know when you're cut your player when he sucks, you know? If you're trying to help him out, you're trying to like, oh, you change your swing and he's still striking out, uh, you do, you can't have emotional attachment to the ideas or the creatives. Uh, you do need to cut them and move on because there's a better idea waiting for it that deserves your time, you know?

Evan Lee: You say that so easily, but that's like so many people's babies that they're just like, oh, that was the one right there. How can we? But I think it's it's good to be pragmatic ultimately and like make those decisions, right?

Jess Bachman: Yeah. Our our Slack is full of dead babies, is what I'll say.

Evan Lee: RIP. RIP to the fallen ones. Uh, Sam has a good question here.

So, I think this touches upon like creative testing. I know you're quite flexible and all honesty, but it touches upon it. So Sam is asking, what is your solution for an ad that performed well in a creative testing campaign but didn't have the same performance once you moved it to a winning campaign or ad set?

Jess Bachman: Yeah. So, um, it could be that the ad set or the campaign already has particular learnings based off what type of ads are already winning there. And that your your your ad that you're testing, um, has space to find the people in the algorithm that resonate with that particular ad. And maybe it's a little bit of a different demographic or, you know, people that maybe it's a different trend or something. And then so when you move it, uh, it now needs to swim in that particular, you know, pool, which might be have different learnings or something. So, um, I do feel that if you want to like broaden, like really broaden the account, it is important to try and group together, uh, concepts or ideas within particular ad sets so they can, um, overlap with only the like the right people and allow new concepts and new ideas to to thrive.

Evan Lee: Amazing. And I think people always talk about too about iterating yourself and the algorithm into a corner. So I'm curious if you have thoughts on that. Like are you a believer? Is it, uh, where's your head at?

Jess Bachman: Yeah, so we'll we'll usually, it really depends on what you're looking at in Motion. If you can, we we start with the hook rate and and we can make some changes to that. And if it works, great. But if we don't, we don't rehab an ad. Like, you you know, you need to know when to like, you need to know when you're cut your player when he sucks, you know? If you're trying to help him out, you're trying to like, oh, you change your swing and he's still striking out, uh, you do, you can't have emotional attachment to the ideas or the creatives. Uh, you do need to cut them and move on because there's a better idea waiting for it that deserves your time, you know?

Evan Lee: You say that so easily, but that's like so many people's babies that they're just like, oh, that was the one right there. How can we? But I think it's it's good to be pragmatic ultimately and like make those decisions, right?

Jess Bachman: Yeah. Our our Slack is full of dead babies, is what I'll say.

Evan Lee: RIP. RIP to the fallen ones. Uh, Sam has a good question here.

So, I think this touches upon like creative testing. I know you're quite flexible and all honesty, but it touches upon it. So Sam is asking, what is your solution for an ad that performed well in a creative testing campaign but didn't have the same performance once you moved it to a winning campaign or ad set?

Jess Bachman: Yeah. So, um, it could be that the ad set or the campaign already has particular learnings based off what type of ads are already winning there. And that your your your ad that you're testing, um, has space to find the people in the algorithm that resonate with that particular ad. And maybe it's a little bit of a different demographic or, you know, people that maybe it's a different trend or something. And then so when you move it, uh, it now needs to swim in that particular, you know, pool, which might be have different learnings or something. So, um, I do feel that if you want to like broaden, like really broaden the account, it is important to try and group together, uh, concepts or ideas within particular ad sets so they can, um, overlap with only the like the right people and allow new concepts and new ideas to to thrive.

Evan Lee: I feel like I can always count on you for the metaphors and bring it there. Swimming pools, baseball metaphors. We're good, man. We're good.

Jess Bachman: I get paid by metaphor.

Evan Lee: Paid by metaphor. Woo. There we go.

So, Ace is jumping in. Ace has a question. How are you organizing, keeping track of, etcetera, different ad angles, messaging concepts, ad formats, etcetera, that are being developed and launched?

Jess Bachman: Yep. So, um, we use Notion. We're big believers in Notion. Notion is a a platform where you need to bring your system to Notion. It will not provide the system for you. But once you have a system, um, then it can do very well. We actually used to use, uh, Notion for ad reports as well. We'd take data and then bring it back to into Notion. But that was before we switched to Motion, which has saved us like a ton of time. Yeah. Um, so we've entirely ditched that because Motion is clearly the better tool.

Evan Lee: I remember that conversation.

Jess Bachman: Yeah.

Evan Lee: I think the part that I tap into there is just like, be human on both ends. Like that's how I approach it. Like even Jess, me and you in our first conversation, like we kept it like completely just like organic on the approach. So we made sure that it was just like a spot that we're all happy with at the end of the day.

Jess Bachman: Yep. And the the smaller the companies, the better they are to work with you as well. Um, I would not expect this type of thing from Adobe. If you're like, you're too expensive, it's not going to happen, you know?

Evan Lee: Jess, the only part of this that I'm curious about, so we talked about like Air moving from Google Drive. I think just to like round out the rest of the stack, you talked about Motion, but let's talk about like literally editing. Are you using frame.io to like send comments back and forth? Are you in like CapCut or what are you using?

Jess Bachman: No. So, we use Adobe Suite for for all editing. We have an in-house editor. Um, we use Slack to do comms, basically. We'll post the ad in, we have a special channel that's called ad review. Anytime someone gets posted there, you know, it's like very present in people's Slacks. You know that you need to comment on that. Our whole team has the ability to comment on our ads. It's not like just the client or just whatever. Our our account people comment on the ads and so Slack is actually the best tool to categorize and keep that. We've explored other options, um, and it's like, it can be cool if there's like one feature where you're like, I want to highlight a thing in the video. That's not a feature that that is going to get over. If you have worse communication but better ability to draw a circle on the screen, that's not a that's not the move, you know?

Evan Lee: Solving the right problem every single time is so important, regardless of the platform.

Jess Bachman: Right.

Evan Lee: Yeah. I think we have time for potentially one more question here, and it's one that I've seen a through line about as well.

So Kassidy is asking, would you recommend content that performed well on social organically and could be seen as ad-friendly to be tried as an ad? And just the through line here is that I've also seen another question that asks the same thing about TV. Like if we're seeing success on TV, are there things and learnings we can take? So.

Jess Bachman: Yeah. Well, 100%. TV is a hugely separate conversation. But if you see something that performs well on social, I would not dump it into your ad account and expect performance. One thing we do see when that happens is like, it gets great engagement, but it's not, it needs to sell. Like your ads need to sell. They can't entertain. And a lot of times we'll make ads that like entertain people and they'll stay for like a minute, but we're not we're not doing the selling. And so a lot of times these organic things, um, won't do the selling. So my tactic or what I suggest is to, we have this, we have this concept called a base unit, where it's basically an ad that has all the features and benefits, best testimonials, whatever. It's about 30 seconds. Um, throw that base unit onto the end of the organic content. So people, if people get to it, they'll probably stay to watch a little bit more, and now you have that selling component. And that might have a better chance of rising in the ranks.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Jess, you came through, absolutely smashed it. I'm just curious, like are there any final words that you want to leave with the people?

Jess Bachman: Uh, no, I'm literally about to pass out because it's so hot in my office right now and I'm wearing a sweater. But I appreciate everyone, um, for coming on. It's an honor to be here with you guys and all these other gals that were that were on stage as well. Um, follow everything. You you literally can't go wrong. I agree with everyone that has been on stage so far. So we're you're in good company.

Evan Lee: Jess, absolutely incredible people. We have to throw, we have to throw some love in the chat here. Have to, have to. Jess did not disappoint when we're talking about creative hot takes and spitting creative fire. So, please, chat, show him some love. Show him some love. Was she here? Jump in, please. Like we got to. All caps. All caps. Hi, Jess. Hi, Jess. And then your kids too. We got to get your kids in here. I love it. Love it. Appreciate you, Jess. Everyone else, uh, we've reached the time of the show. No pressure at all. If you are interested, Jess talked a lot about Motion and I'd love to show you all a little bit of where we can help relating to some of the pieces he had mentioned. Honestly, no pressure if not, by the way. I'm here to hang out with you all, kick back, relax, and talk all things creative strategy. Okay, everybody? Amazing. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen now. Fantastic. Christiana is saying, tell us about the map. The map. That is my conversation starter of where I've been around the world. ASMR Evan. Yeah, we'll bring it back. Trust me, I got you all. But everyone, before I jump into Motion, I also just wanted to say like, really appreciate everyone's eyes and ears throughout this entire webinar series that we've hosted called Make Ads That Convert. I think everyone in the chat can literally tell like this is an amazing community. You see how engaged everyone is, not just yourself typing into the chat, but with each other. And that's something we don't really see too much all over the place. So I feel like everywhere else, it's just like if you can, like try to recreate this feeling. Like it feels good to be amongst peers that you ultimately respect. Okay. That's my that's my soapbox, but I've I've thoroughly enjoyed, uh, seeing the chat and everything that was going on. So thank you, everybody. Warm in the bottom of my heart. Okay. The piece that I wanted to jump into now is actually diving into Motion and talking a lot about like those concepts and angles so we can start to understand what's going on there.

So the first place that people typically start is when we're thinking about creative, it's diving straight into the actual like granular creative itself. And the mark, I got you. This is where we get nice and close and then we talk about different ways that you can start to look at creative performance. So in my view that I have here, essentially what I'm now doing, I can't keep it up for long. I'm sorry, everybody. I'm sorry. I can't keep it up for long. But in my view that I have here, I'm looking at my concepts and you can tell I'm not actually focused on my granular creative quite yet. What I'm actually focused on instead is higher level insights. So you can see here I have us versus them versus listicle, five-star review, podcast style, and before and after. And what this style of report allows us to do is build better communication flows exactly like Jess had mentioned. So what does that mean as an example? That could mean I'm literally in a meeting with my team and I'm saying, hey, before and after, we've spent a ton of money on it, but it doesn't seem to be providing us with the returns that we're happy with. What's going on? But on the other end, when we look at us versus them, we know we've spent a lot of money and we know that we're receiving really strong returns. So in this world, when I'm looking around at the rest of the team, I'm literally going to be like, team, let's continue to double down on us versus them. It's absolutely crushing it. And at this point, guess what? We all now have alignment on either what that one, two, or four week schedule look like that Jess was talking about. And to determine what we want to make, guess what? We need some inspiration along the way. So that means if we click on us versus them, like I was just showcasing, what we're going to be able to see here is the creative that is all chunked by us versus them and ultimately what's the best performer along the way. So now we know everybody can focus on making more us versus them, but also, guess what? This is the inspiration along the way that's going to take it to the next level for you. Okay, everybody? Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think the final piece that I wanted to show everybody is that Motion's not all about the high-level strategic insights. It also jumps into the granular discussion too, whether it be iterative based or just in your day-to-day.

So what I mean by that is if I jump into my top creatives report here, this specific view that I have is what we call our card view. So what I mean here is we're actually looking at creative in such a simple and easy way where no one's going to be overwhelmed. We can see everything as it relates to video performance and image performance and then the associated hold rates, hook rates, and all of those different pieces. And from this point, if you need to communicate and easily action upon this as a next step, all you need to do is right click this card and copy it and paste it into a deck. Or guess what? You can literally download the GIF and upload it to your deck so it automatically plays. So, so long are the days when you had to take a million steps of downloading information from Facebook, pivot tabling it yourself, copy and pasting into a deck, taking a link from Facebook, throwing it into a deck. Do I have to continue? Please don't make me continue. And I turn that into two steps for you all, okay? So, if anyone's curious, I'm just going to throw a quick poll up onto the screen as I as I remove my screen share really quickly.

And what I'm curious about again is no pressure at all, but those who are interested, if you would like to learn more about Motion, feel free and go ahead and hit yeah. If not, don't worry about it. And if you're on the fence, let me know what I got to do to make it happen. You need some more ASMR? I'm your guy. Can make that happen nice and easily. We're good to go. Everybody, how are we feeling? How are we feeling? I still see 300 people hanging out. Is everybody okay? Doing well? James is great. Sandra's to the moon. Still here. Alejandro in the building. Absolutely incredible. The only questions I have is if anyone else has any final questions, okay? Maddie, don't even worry about it. Got your back. Thank you for attending. You are the real MVP at the end of the day. So if anyone else has final questions, let's just throw it into the chat. If not, don't even worry about it. Everybody, this has been an absolute blast. We're going to send those recordings out after the fact, so feel free to help that spread that so we can grow the community that we all see here today. And feel free to connect with Motion on on all social platforms. Feel free to connect with myself on LinkedIn or Twitter. You know I'm on there. Um, but this has been an absolute blast, y'all. Let's do it one more time, chat. Throw love, throw love into the chat. We need to. This has been an absolutely amazing ride these past five weeks with you all, okay? Hey. Hey. Okay. The love, the love. There definitely will be more seminars and webinars, so please subscribe to our email list because we're going to send them out. You know we're always dropping fire content, so we're going to continue. But everybody, this has been absolutely incredible. I love the love. You all are the best, and we're going to see you at the next one. Peace.